First of all, the TiVo tuners seem to be equal to or better than the Dish Pal tuners, which are fine. Also similar to the old Dish tuner/converters.

HOWEVER, I am between 50 -70 miles north of Fresno, CA in the foothills so that I have to use a 30 foot tower with an 8 Bay Bowtie feeding a Channel Master mast preamp. Without the added preamp/tower/bowtie, I get nothing!

Final report on my now closed DTV Pal issues. I received the caps I ordered from Amazon and replaced the bulging cap at C34. Very easy to do and the motherboard was easy to remove from the case without damage. I rediscovered my soldering skills from long ago and had the cap replaced in a few minutes.

End result... no more freezups and the recording option works flawlessly. Plus, with the HD at 1Gb now, I have a lot of room to record!

Instructions to remove the cover, courtesy of AVS member otaviewer in this post:
Quote:

- I unplugged the power
- Removed the smart card from the front so I didn't accidentally break it
- Removed the visible screw on the case's bottom
- Pried off the rubber pad on the case's bottom which is closest to the green and yellow RCA jack and unscrewed the screw underneath
- Pried off the rubber pad on the case's bottom which is diagonal from the one just pried off and unscrewed the screw underneath
- Looked in the slots on the bottom of the case with a flashlight to see that an object could be stuck in them and bent slightly to unlatch, except for the three inner slots with green circuit board visible which can be ignored

- I unbent four medium-thickness 1.5" (2" long measured with a ruler) cotter pins, the kind obtainable from a hardware store, to a 90 degree angle
- Inserted one end of the cotter pin straightly into either one of the two slots closest to the back of the case, to the point where it stopped on its own
- Carefully applied sideways pressure (relative to the case) to the cotter pin so the part of the cotter pin outside the case moved away from the case and the part of the cotter pin inside the case moved toward the other rear slot
- At a certain point while bending the cotter pin sideways and applying slight downward pressure, the cotter pin slipped farther into the case. I let it slide in a bit more. This unhooked the latch in the slot and allowed me to remove my hand from the inserted cotter pin during the rest of the steps.
- I repeated this with the other three slots using the other three bent cotter pins. Noted that the slots in the front only allowed me to insert the cotter pin slightly past the point where the cotter pin stopped on its own.

- I Inserted a flathead screwdriver in between the top and the bottom of the case at the closest corner to one of the back cotter pins
- Twisted the screwdriver at the corner to pry the top and the bottom of the case apart slightly but not enough to damage the case
- At the same time, with my other hand, used another flathead screwdriver to unhook the closest of the two tabs on the rear of the case. That corner of the case now opened up farther
- Removed the screwdriver from the corner of the case
- Inserted the screwdriver slightly to the outside of the tab that the other screwdriver is in, and used it to pry apart the top and bottom of the case just to the point where the screwdriver fits in between the top and bottom of the case
- Removed both screwdrivers, and noted that the top and bottom of the case remain somewhat separated
- Repeated the last six steps with the other rear corner

- I separated the top from the bottom of the case at the back of the case with my hands, without much effort, and noted that this caused the front of the case to also separate

Well, to make things a little easier, start by looking at post 19201 (which, in turn, has a link to post 5383) and a few following it. I have this written on a Post-It note for when I'll eventually need it .

after revisiting my post with pictures, I found some of them cannot be viewed ; error message guiding to call administrator... I'm curious if he could restore eg fix it ?

I just checked a few of your images and they all came up just fine here. But when they redid the board, my old bookmarks were broken. Had to manually point them to the right place. If you still have those images, maybe you could upload them again?

Lately mine has been freezing when playing recorded video forcing a restart. However, today live TV froze too and it would not respond to the remote other than holding down the power key till it restarted.

I happened to have a 2.5" 1TB SATA drive laying around so I installed that. So far it has been at the loading please wait screen for a half hour or so. Is that normal or is this drive not going to work. I believe it was a Seagate about 2 years old.

Lately mine has been freezing when playing recorded video forcing a restart. However, today live TV froze too and it would not respond to the remote other than holding down the power key till it restarted..

Symptoms are more like C34 capacitor failure. Which would also explain why the new drive won't work. When I had a HDD fail the 'Pal put up a HDD error message letting me know.

I have an update on my issue. I left it turned on for hours yesterday showing the loading screen. At some point it turned on and loaded but the DVR/HDD function doesn't work. I was able to watch live TV with no issue or freezing. Would that suggest that the replacement HD I used isn't working? The HD that I installed was a 2.5" from a laptop. Should I have stuck with a 3.5"?

From my experience with a HDD that doesn't always start up, upon reboot of the 'Pal if there is a HDD problem it will stop pretty quickly (within a minute not "hours") in the startup process with a HDD error warning, and the DVR function in the menu will be gray and inoperative. Tuner will still tune channels. FWIW.

I have an update on my issue. I left it turned on for hours yesterday showing the loading screen. At some point it turned on and loaded but the DVR/HDD function doesn't work. I was able to watch live TV with no issue or freezing. Would that suggest that the replacement HD I used isn't working? The HD that I installed was a 2.5" from a laptop. Should I have stuck with a 3.5"?

Physical size shouldn't matter (as long as it fits and the cables are long enough), but make sure it's a SATA II drive. I don't think the Pal downgrades to SATA I.

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